Among the Saudi writers who are experimenting today with new forms and ideas, Abdo Khal is well-known both locally and in the wider Arab world. He has written a number of novels including ‘The Mud,’ ‘Death Passes from Here,’ ‘Days Don’t Hide Anyone,’ ‘Barking’ as well as several collections of short stories.
The center of his fictional universe is the village where he was born and which he left at young age with his family in search of a better life. Most of his works are set in the village and almost all of them have a rural ruthlessness and timidness. Like their maker, Khal’s heroes come from marginal groups and struggle for salvation.
Khal writes in a distinctive, identifiable style blending classical and colloquial Arabic and the southern and Hijazi dialects. Setting is an independent character in his novels. “It is the setting that colors and characterizes people’s lives,” he asserts. “Place molds us according to its mighty will, not to our wishes.” As a writer Khal blends rural and urban themes in his writings and does his best to shape events and characters to fit in his fictitious world.
The Jeddah-based writer was born in 1962 in Al-Majanah, a relatively isolated village in the Kingdom’s far south. In such places the need to survive and the struggle to do so dominates life. “The harsh life there gives little importance to childhood,” Khal remembers. “Even at only three years of age, a child may be expected to ride a donkey and fetch water from a well several kilometers away.” Khal pauses for a while and remembers, “As a villager, birds were my number one enemy. My job was to keep them away from our field and protect the precious harvest that my family was involved in producing.” Not surprisingly, Khal uses a great deal from his experiences in the village in his fictional world. As a child, his main entertainment was sitting beside an old lady who, as he says, “controlled the universe through her endless stories.”
Unfortunately he lost his father when he was very young and he, his mother and siblings were left without a protector in the village. His mother was unable to carry on the agricultural work and so she took her family to Jeddah where her sister had moved earlier. The family lived in a poor part of the city where they carried on the life of the village in an urban setting. The tranquil world the family was accustomed to continued in Jeddah as they lived with relatives and other migrants from the southern villages. Within Jeddah, they lived in their own world. As a result, Khal was surrounded by village rituals and customs and by the southern accent. He comments, “Southerners who leave their homeland are like plants. They try to stay close to their roots in order to endure the experience of having left.” In addition, Khal continued to amuse himself with stories of magic and enchantment told by his mother instead of the old lady in the village.
Life in the city was not easy for the family; they had to dig for money and seize any opportunity that promised cash. Khal was not excluded from the struggle and he sold candy and gums. In order to bring in customers, he made up plays and performed them for other children.
His appreciation for a good story was changed in adolescence to writing them. He sought ways to distinguish himself and made his reputation among his teenage friends by writing eloquently passionate love letters to girls who had captured their affections. Ironically, one of the girls advised the man who she thought had written her such moving letters that he “might have a shot at being a writer.”
In his life as in his work, Khal was unpredictable. He changed his field of study while at university from engineering to medicine and finally to political science. “I knew I was destined to be a writer,” he said and while at King Abdul Aziz University, he began writing for Okaz where he still produces a daily column. Nevertheless, he does not consider himself a journalist. “I don’t aspire to journalistic glories. I keep my eye on creative writing, knowing that I love fiction and my real future is to write about that world.”
A fact not well-known to Khal’s readers is that besides journalism and being a novelist, the father of four has another completely different job. He earns his living from teaching Arabic to sixth graders at a government school. Unfortunately, Khal’s books are not available in the Kingdom though they have been published in Europe and Beirut; they can be bought all over the world except in his own country. One of his short stories, however, recently found its way into “Banipal,” a British magazine which publishes Arabic literature exclusively.
